CURL alternative in Python

Here's a simple example using urllib2 that does a basic authentication against GitHub's API.

import urllib2

u='username'
p='userpass'
url='https://api.github.com/users/username'

# simple wrapper function to encode the username & pass
def encodeUserData(user, password):
    return "Basic " + (user + ":" + password).encode("base64").rstrip()

# create the request object and set some headers
req = urllib2.Request(url)
req.add_header('Accept', 'application/json')
req.add_header("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded")
req.add_header('Authorization', encodeUserData(u, p))
# make the request and print the results
res = urllib2.urlopen(req)
print res.read()

Furthermore if you wrap this in a script and run it from a terminal you can pipe the response string to 'mjson.tool' to enable pretty printing.

>> basicAuth.py | python -mjson.tool

One last thing to note, urllib2 only supports GET & POST requests.
If you need to use other HTTP verbs like DELETE, PUT, etc you'll probably want to take a look at PYCURL

import urllib2

manager = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
manager.add_password(None, 'https://app.streamsend.com/emails', 'login', 'key')
handler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(manager)

director = urllib2.OpenerDirector()
director.add_handler(handler)

req = urllib2.Request('https://app.streamsend.com/emails', headers = {'Accept' : 'application/xml'})

result = director.open(req)
# result.read() will contain the data
# result.info() will contain the HTTP headers

# To get say the content-length header
length = result.info()['Content-Length']

Your cURL call using urllib2 instead. Completely untested.

If you are using a command to just call curl like that, you can do the same thing in Python with subprocess. Example:

subprocess.call(['curl', '-i', '-H', '"Accept: application/xml"', '-u', 'login:key', '"https://app.streamsend.com/emails"'])

Or you could try PycURL if you want to have it as a more structured api like what PHP has.

You can use HTTP Requests that are described in the Requests: HTTP for Humans user guide.